Kong Inc. Acquires Insomnia; Expands Service Control Platform to Unify Design, Testing and Management Across REST APIs, gRPC, GraphQL and Kafka

New acquisition and enhanced product capabilities provide a comprehensive platform for managing the full lifecycle of services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

SAN FRANCISCO (Kong Summit 2019) October 2, 2019 Kong Inc., creators of the leading API and service lifecycle management platform, today announced an acquisition and several new products at the second annual Kong Summit 2019 conference. Built to go beyond traditional API management and address all service types, Kongs intelligent service control platform uses machine learning to provide a comprehensive solution for designing, testing and managing services across all protocols, platforms and architecture patterns.

Kong acquired Insomnia, a popular open source API testing platform, to expand Kongs portfolio of open source technologies and provide the foundation for the new Kong Studio, an integrated service design and collaboration suite. At the crux of the latest Kong Enterprise release is multi-protocol support for frictionless communication across REST, gRPC, GraphQL and Kafka services, as well as enhanced machine learning add-ons and several other major features to further improve the way organizations build, connect and manage their services. Kong also announced new open source releases of Kong Gateway and the Kuma universal service mesh project.

The way software is built and managed is undergoing a revolution as organizations transition to distributed software architectures for modern applications that demand massive scalability, cross-platform support and the ability to process real-time streams of data in motion. According to IDC, by 2023, more than 90 percent of enterprises will build digital native IT environments, including cloud-centric service delivery. Kongs technology makes it possible for organizations to continuously innovate using the latest tools, without disrupting existing services and systems, by bridging the gap between legacy and new cloud native environments.

Today, were delivering the industrys first comprehensive platform for full lifecycle service management to make data available anytime, anywhere from design to production, and function as the nervous system for hybrid- and multi-cloud organizations, said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. Last year, we debuted our vision for an intelligent service control platform for connecting, managing and optimizing services in production, and were excited to expand that vision to include how services are designed, tested and distributed among increasingly decentralized workloads. With todays news, we are providing developers the freedom to test and build in the best way possible, while also providing management teams with the tools to ensure efficiency and governance.

Kong Inc. Introduces New Solutions for the Service Control Platform

Insomnia Acquisition: As an early supporter of the popular open source API testing platform, Kong acquired Insomnia to expand Kongs design and testing capabilities, as well as further grow Insomnias technology and open source community. Committed to providing tools that developers need to build the future of software, Kong will continue to support Insomnia as an independent open source project.
Kong Enterprise 2020: Built on top of open source Kong Gateway, Kong Enterprise 2020 provides an end-to-end service control platform for multi-cloud and hybrid organizations. New features include protocol support for REST, Kafka Streams, gRPC and GraphQL, support for developing plugins in Go, and huge improvements to the Kong Manager UI and Kong Dev Portal. Kong Enterprise 2020 customers can also access new machine learning capabilities for anomaly detection with Kong Immunity and a visual service map with Kong Brain.
Kong Studio: Kong Studio provides a robust suite of tools to help developers design, build and maintain APIs for REST and GraphQL endpoints. Built on top of the popular open source API testing and debugging tool Insomnia, Kong Studio allows users to edit spec files, generate mock endpoints with Mockbin, and publish directly into the Kong Gateway, Registry and Dev Portal. Kong Studio is available as a standalone add-on to Kong Enterprise
Kong Gateway 2.0: The latest release of open source Kong Gateway features the ability to write plugins in Go via Kongs Plugin Development Kit, expanded capabilities for DB-less deployments, separation of data plane and control plane, and support for proxying GraphQL services.
Kuma: Released on September 10, open source Kuma is a modern, simple and pragmatic universal control plane for service mesh based on Envoy. The latest version features improvements for better performance and stability.

The move to cloud native software architectures using microservices and containers and DevOps methodologies is well underway, and we forecast that near 25% of server container and virtualization software units shipped in 2023 will be used for cloud native applications, up from 8% in 2018*, said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., executive director & technology fellow, cloud and data center research practice, IHS Markit | Technology, now a part of Inform Tech. Managing distributed software architectures for modern applications that demand massive scalability with open source-based tools like Kong Enterprise fortified with AI and ML capabilities will be in demand by developers.

We're really excited about the service map in Kong Brain. It's going to be a great way for us to provide our developers with an easy reference point for how our services interact and get a picture of how traffic is flowing," said Stephen Garlick, lead DevOps engineer at Discovery. "We've rapidly increased the number of services we're running over the past few years, so being able to see all of the dependencies and get Kong Immunity alerts directly in the service map will make it a lot easier to make sure that our services are running as well as possible.

Thousands of organizations across all industries, including AppDynamics, Cargill, SoulCycle and WeWork, currently use Kong Enterprise and Kong Gateway to better manage traffic for microservices, containers, cloud and serverless.

To learn more about Kong and how it can help organizations, please visit:

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About Kong Inc.

Kong delivers a next-generation API and service lifecycle management platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Offering high flexibility, scalability, speed and performance, Kong enables developers and Global 5000 enterprises to reliably secure, connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for modern applications. Kong is building the future of service control platforms to intelligently broker information across services. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com/ or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.

*Source: IHS Markit | Technology, now part of Informa Tech, Multi-Tenant Server Software Quarterly Market Tracker: Q1 2019

2 July 2019. 2023 container software market share in terms of unit shipments. Results are not an endorsement of Kong. Any reliance on these results is at the third-partys own risk.